“Every painter recapitulates the history of painting in his or her own way,” wrote Gilles Deleuze in his Francis Bacon study. It is a deceptively simple way of wording a complicated insight about being a painter and the labour it takes to make your practice count.

Gearldine O’Neill works through the history of painting rather like a dancer who goes hill-walking on Everest and discovers a panoramic base camp peopled by artists, scientists and philosophers. It is about time. About space too. Above all, it is about painting from the skin, meaning that technique matters and that craft must be conceptualised before it appears as art.